How I Store My Polish - Very Picture Heavy

Hey!

Right, first of all, ye know how much I ramble, and I have 18 pictures ready to go. You might want to go make coffee. Click the pictures for a closer look if you're as nosey as I am.

A few weeks ago, I reached my patience limit with my old storage unit. It was crammed with polish and it took me ages to find anything. Proof? Here:

After debating for a long time whether or not to make the trip to IKEA for a Helmer, I saw this on the Littlewoods website. Of COURSE it's on sale now, when I paid stupid money for it, AAAAGH! Sickened.

Anyway, here it is, it's massive and it came with wheels but I didn't bother with them, I see no reason to be lugging a giant storage unit around.

What won me over were the two little drawers on the top, they're perfect for nail art stuff and non-polish things. Here's drawer number one:

Nail tips, brushes, skewers, acrylic paints, acrylic nail set (with a liquid that should be banished to the seventh level of hell where it belongs, smell of it - my son calls it the liquid of death) and my little embellishment case (bought from Cork Art Supplies along with the acrylic paint & brushes). Here's a look at the case:

I use it for glitters, glequins, tape, tip guides, microbeads, eyes (don't ask), bows, tips for the practice finger, etc. I love the little bottles, I picked some glitter ones up on eBay a while back and I was sent some amazing bar glitters & mixed glitters from the lovely Jenna in a recent swap, which I'll post about soon.

Here's the second little drawer:

This one has my nail art pens, files, straws & orange sticks, nail stickers, embellishment wheels, stamping plates & stamper, old bank card for scraper, pre-cut foil & pads, nail wraps, broadway nails, velvet powder, sponges, toe separators (which I never use, the feeling of my toes being stretched makes me want to heave) and cuticle gel.

Now for the polish - some polishes (like Essence Colour & Go or Revlon) are easily recognisable by the top of their caps. Others are not (hello Catrice). So, I divided all my polish up by brand, then labelled them all starting with the number one. As I was labelling, I got some card, punched holes in the sides, put some ribbon through (so I can add more pages) and made a swatch book.

This took an obscene amount of time and I was praying that nobody would come in and see it - one of himself's sisters was once shocked by the amount of nail polish I owned and there were only 11 on the table - I fear I would be sectioned if anyone saw them all laid out. Wanna see some pages?

It's already made life so much easier, when I fancy a particular colour now I can just have a look at my swatches and then find the number! I label & swatch each new polish as I get it. Here's big drawer one:

It started off as mostly Essence, OPI minis, Tony Moly, Stargazer & other randoms but to be honest every drawer is a bit of a mish-mash. Big drawer two:

This one has Barry M, Nicole by OPI, Rimmel, Revlon, Angelica, & more randoms. Big Drawer three:

Catrice, Polish remover, and basically anything I've recently bought or received in a swap. The other three drawers are for skin stuff and makeup that I don't use on a daily basis (I have a little make-up bag for my everyday stuff).

The first one has cotton pads, face masks, haisrpray, cleanser, tan, mitt, wipes, etc.

The second has lipstick, lip pencils, lipbalm (that giant lollipop thing is a Chupa Chups lipgloss probably aimed at children, but hey) and brushes, primer, eyeliner.

The last one has foundation, eyeshadow, palettes, false lashes, bronzer, blusher, mascara.

While I was at it, I said I'd take a couple more storage pictures - here's earring/perfume storage and my old polish tower which now houses the empty OPI mini boxes (yes, I kept them, I'm weird), hair rollers, moisturizer, bracelets, big jewellery.

Good job himself doesn't have much stuff, isn't it? That little box on top of the Glamour magazines was from a Christmas present, it contained 6 polishes from Fearne Cotton's collection for Boots. I use it to store my rings & some chains and apparently a dice, no idea why that's in there.

And lastly, is limbo, or the box that I throw stuff into when I find it in places it shouldn't be. This is just basically a big box of stuff that I should really organise but can't be bothered to:

And there you have it. How I store my polish and other things. Go have a lie down, you deserve it for getting to the end.